This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Reviewed by Debs Carr
Emma Joseph lives happily in the countryside with her husband David and their eight-month-old son, Ollie. It has taken time to get their life to how it is now after David’s devastating loss six years earlier when his wife, Caroline, died in a car crash just before Christmas, and his six-year-old daughter, Natasha (Tasha) went missing. One day, as Emma is playing with her little son, she gazes out of the window only to see two eyes watching her, from behind, from her kitchen. It is a young girl, who turns out to be Tasha, and her arrival sets in motion incidents that will be both life-threatening and life-changing for all of them. When Emma realizes that she and David are unable to deal with the situation themselves, she goes behind his back, contacts her friend DCI Tom Douglas and pleads with him to help.
I was immediately drawn into this story, but when Emma spots those haunted eyes staring at her from inside her home I gasped and couldn’t stop reading. As this psychological thriller unfolds, the reader follows both Emma and David’s story, but also that of other characters, including Tasha and her abductors. As their lives becomes sucked into the dark, cruel underworld they discover what had happened to the damaged child who has so unexpectedly arrived in their home and what her appearance means to them all.
This excellent thriller is full of twists and turns that I didn’t see coming, where characters not only develop in strength but others crumble and turn out not to be the people you’d expected them to be. The chapters are short which meant that I kept promising myself that I’d stop reading at the end of the next chapter, and the next, ending up finishing the book well after 2am when my eyes were closing with tiredness. Having read Stranger Child, I've now downloaded Rachel Abbott's other three books and can completely understand why all of them have been bestsellers.
Absorbing, complex and brilliantly planned, I loved this book.10/10